RAID

Redundant Array of Independent Disks, or RAID, is a method of keeping content on a number of hard disks at the same time. A RAID might be software or hardware depending on the drives that are used - physical or logical ones, but what is common between them is the fact that they all perform as one single unit where info is saved. The main advantage of employing a RAID is redundancy because the data on all drives shall be identical all of the time, so even in case some drive fails for whatever reason, the information will still be present on the other drives. The overall performance is also better because the reading and writing processes could be split between a number of drives, so a single one can't be overloaded. There're different sorts of RAIDs where the efficiency and fault tolerance may vary based on the specific setup - whether data is written on all the drives real-time or it's written on one drive and after that mirrored on another, what number of drives are used for the RAID, etc.

The SSD drives which our cutting-edge cloud hosting platform uses for storage work in RAID-Z. This type of RAID is intended to work with the ZFS file system which runs on the platform and it uses the so-called parity disk - a special drive where info saved on the other drives is copied with an additional bit added to it. In the event that one of the disks stops working, your Internet sites will continue working from the other ones and as soon as we replace the malfunctioning one, the info which will be cloned on it will be rebuilt from what is stored on the remaining drives as well as the data from the parity disk. This is performed in order to be able to recalculate the bits of each file properly and to confirm the integrity of the info copied on the new drive. This is one more level of security for the information which you upload to your cloud hosting account in addition to the ZFS file system which analyzes a special digital fingerprint for each and every file on all the drives in real time.

The data uploaded to any semi-dedicated server account is kept on SSD drives which operate in RAID-Z. One of the drives in this kind of a setup is used for parity - any time data is copied on it, an extra bit is added. In case a disk happens to be defective, it will be removed from the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites because the data will load from the rest of the drives, and when a new drive is added, the data that will be copied on it will be a blend between the information on the parity disk and data stored on the other drives in the RAID. That is done to guarantee that the information that is being copied is correct, so once the new drive is rebuilt, it could be included in the RAID as a production one. This is one more guarantee for the integrity of your info since the ZFS file system which runs on our cloud hosting platform analyzes a special checksum of all the copies of your files on the separate drives in order to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.